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Julia
This section briefly describes some of the nuances of using Julia in Stronghold. In particular, there are some subtle issues that we must keep in mind when using Julia in Stronghold. These subtleties are primarily related to the cache files that Julia writes as part of its normal operations.
Note that the documentation below pertains only to Julia installations that are part of Conda environment modules in Stronghold. If you are working with the "container-ized" Julia in Stronghold, then the issues discussed below do not apply.
Julia has a built-in variable called
DEPOT_PATH
. The variable controls where the package manager looks for registries, installed packages, named Julia environments, cloned repos, cached compiled package images, configuration files, as well as the REPL history file. This variable is an array of directory paths on the file system. In Stronghold, the default is for DEPOT_PATH
to hold only the location of the installed Julia packages for a given Conda environment. For example, in the conda/bcbi_v0.2.6
environment, the Julia DEPOT_PATH
will (by default) contain only the following: /opt/browncis/conda/envs/bcbi_v0.2.6/julia-1.2.0/local/share/julia
The major caveat in Stronghold is that the software that is shared across workstations lives in a central read-only file system. This creates a problem when Julia tries to write cached files to the file system, since it is not write-able.
The way we address the above problem of the read-only file system is by adding an entry to the
DEPOT_PATH
variable. More specifically, we will create a new directory at ~/.julia_depot
and then add this as an entry to the DEPOT_PATH
variable in Julia. This has a few steps, which are outlined below (note that these steps only need to be complete once).- 1.In a new Terminal window, run
mkdir ~/.julia_depot
to create a location for storing cache files - 2.Next, run
mkdir -p ~/.julia/config
to create the location for storing ourstartup.jl
file - 3.Run
touch ~/.julia/config/startup.jl
to create the start-up configuration file - 4.Finally, run the command below
echo 'pushfirst!(DEPOT_PATH, "/data/home/<USERNAME>/.julia_depot")' >> ~/.julia/config/startup.jl
where
<USERNAME>
contains the given user's username—note that you can obtain your username by running whoami
from the Linux command line.Last modified 3yr ago